THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 17, Issue 6, 23 January 1903, Page 2

THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS.

Tn tracing the relationship of human races, we hold on to language as the most reliable chain of connecting links that still survives between widely sundered races ; but we almost totally neglect the almost equal value in this respect oi the language of birds. By a man’s dialect you can tell a man’s county sometimes oven his town ; by his actual “ language ” his nation ; by the roots of his words you can fix his nation’s place in the human family ; but from a bird’s language we learn nothing whatever. This is the more surprising because the birds’ language is so easily analysed. Tt has no accidence or syntax, no conflicting alphabets or confusion of accents. Its consonants arc very few, and the entire vocabulary of most species scarcely contain a dozen words. But we do not realise what birds’ language is, because we pay so much attentiov to their song, whereas this is the least important of the nine phrases of bird language from a scientific point of view. Anyone who is familiar with poultry unconsciously learns to distinguish and understand their language First there is the " cheep ” of the chicken. Ordinarily this is pitched in a comfortable conversational key, and so long as you hear it at intervals you know that everything is going on all right with the brood ; but when you hear it loudly and rap idly repeated you go out to see what is frightening the chickens, and a very loud and insistently prolonged cheeping tells you that one of the chickens has “ got lost.” But the cheeping of the chicks is not the only sound that comes fror the fowl-run. From the clucking of the old hen you can tell whether she is merely keeping her family round her while she looks for food, when she has found something good, when she espies danger, when -she summons her chicks to shelter, when she misses them and when she is trying to terrify an enemy on their behalf. Then there is the fowl with no family as yet ; you can hear her communicative " cluck ” on discovering an unexplored yard, by which she invites the company generally to come and give her their opinions, the reassuring cluck by which she leads them past the gate, the warning note she utters when something moves in the straw, and the squawk of terror with which she rushes from the place on discovering that it is a boy. If it is some lesser evil she will stand aloof uttering raucous cries from her stretched neck and all the poultry-yard will join in the chorus. At such times you aio liable to be deceived into thinking she has laid an egg, for it is one of the peculiarities of fowl language that the same phrases seem to be employed to announce a new-laid egg in the nest-box and a cat in the straw-yard. But I think that the clamour of a hen that has laid an egg is really a device to distract attention from it. To the cat in the straw-yard she shouts " I see you ! ” like a woman, who from the doorway, suspects a burglar’s boots under her bed ; and so after leaving an egg in the nest, she comes out and shouts " I see you ! ” because the race has found by experience that this is a good way of distracting the attention of lurking enemies from tbe egg which cannot, fly to the hen which can. Similar utility, no doubt attaches to the absurd clatter the hen makes when the irritated cat comes out of the straw and compels her to fly over the wall. Fowls are by nature creatures of the jungle, and the over-present danger of their lives was that, in foraging about, they should come upon a dangerous enemy unexpectedly. Also being ground birds there was danger that an enemy might come unexpectedly on them. Now mere human intelligence would probably never have hit upon the device of meeting this double peril by making the endangered fowl go off like an explosion of fireworks or a cluttering earthquake. Yet if you nearly tread on a hen in the dust, your first impression of what has happened is something of this kind ; and you have only to watch a puppy chase a hen into a corner, and witness his consternation when she explodes over the wall, to comprehend the utility of the trick.